Sunday, September 14, 2008

New playthings?

It'd been a while since I last tried out a new flavour of social network, so I splurged on a handful of online aggregators today, looking for something which compared favourably with Facebook for pulling together my various activities across blogging, music, photo and bookmarking sites. Sadly, nothing really succeeded.

Out of the multitude of available options, I had an initial play with the following: FriendFeed, Mugshot, SecondBrain, Youmeo, and SocialURL.

Of these, FriendFeed was really the only one to come close to what I was looking for, delivering a seamless RSS feed from 7 of the sites I use. Normally that would only be useful for someone-not-me, since I'm the one putting the content there in the first place, so an update to the feed shouldn't really surprise me. However, FriendFeed allows you to define "imaginary" friends, by specifying their public pages (e.g. blogs, Flickr, LibraryThing) and it turns that all into one big combined feed. To be honest, that's not immediately useful, since I already subscribe to a host of individual feeds giving me the same info, but if my PC dies or I'm away from home it would make getting updates much easier.
Blogged with the Flock Browser

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the mention in the blog :)

    I'm from Youmeo and am very interested in what we could do to improve the experience for you. What is it that makes FriendFeed win over Youmeo? I would imagine the fact we haven't yet support "many" services but this is due to the fact we put in a lot more features per service so it takes a little longer. Still anything else on top of this you would like to mention please drop me a line at greg@youmeo.com. Looking forward to hearing from you :)

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